The present invention relates to an apparatus, a method, and a program for recognizing postures or gestures of an object person from images of the object person captured by cameras.
As disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No.2000-149025 (pages 3-6, and FIG. 1), various gesture recognition methods have been proposed, in which feature points indicating an object person's motion feature are detected from images of the object person captured by cameras to estimate the gesture of the object person based on the feature points.
However, in this conventional gesture recognition method, it is necessary to calculate probabilities of gestures or postures of the object person based on the feature points whenever a gesture of the object person is recognized. This disadvantageously requires a large amount of calculations for the posture recognition process or the gesture recognition process.
With the foregoing drawback of the conventional art in view, the present invention seeks to provide a gesture recognition apparatus, a gesture recognition method, and a gesture recognition program, which can decrease the calculation process upon recognizing postures or gestures.